Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995 (3 page)

With imported rubber trees, the French created a new industry. By 1940 there were more than six hundred rubber plantations in Vietnam, but a handful of French companies controlled them. Poverty forced thousands of Vietnamese peasants to leave home for years to work the French plantations. The taxes imposed by the top-heavy French bureaucracy added to the poverty. “French imperialism,” Ho Chi Minh declared in 1920, “conquered our country with bayonets. Since then we have not only been oppressed and exploited shamelessly, but also tortured and poisoned pitilessly.... Prisons outnumber schools and are always over-crowded.... Thousands of Vietnamese have been led to a slow death or massacred.” Though not so eloquent, millions of Vietnamese felt the same way. To them France was a nation of police, soldiers, pimps, tax collectors, and labor recruiters.

Almost as bad was the Vietnamese elite who did the French bidding. For any Vietnamese to succeed in the French colony, he or she had to be a French-speaking Roman Catholic who carried out the edicts of the empire. If these Vietnamese were not mandarins in their educational background, they were just as elitist, just as hierarchical, and just as conservative. They got the best government posts, the finest homes, and the largest estates. Ho Chi Minh referred to them as
colonis indigeniae
[indigenous colonists]: “If you take the largest and strongest member of the herd and fasten a bright substance to its neck, a gold coin or a cross, it becomes completely docile.... This weird... animal goes by the name of
colonis indigeniae
, but depending on its habitat it is referred to as Annamese, Madagascan, Algerian, Indian.”

Nguyen Sinh Sac’s job at the imperial court had given him a living but no dignity. Indeed, he came to view the post as a dishonor. “Being a mandarin,” he said many times, “is the ultimate form of slavery.” Sac refused to let Ho Chi Minh even study for the examinations. He refused to speak French, arguing that doing so “would corrupt my Vietnamese,” and openly advocated the abolition of the mandarin class and the disintegration of the French empire. Nguyen Sinh Sac was one of Nghe An’s most troublesome children. The French fired him.

The father passed on those passions to his children. His daughter Nguyen Thanh worked in Vinh supervising a French military mess hall and smuggled rifles and ammunition to the De Tham guerrillas, a group already fighting against the French. When French police convicted her of treason, the mandarin judge gave her a life sentence and an epitaph: “Other women bring forth children, you bring forth rifles.” Her brother Nguyen Khiem was just as militant. He repeatedly wrote eloquent letters to French officials protesting Vietnamese poverty and calling for freedom. But it was the other son—Nguyen Sinh Cung, later known as Ho Chi Minh—who realized Sac’s dream.

At five years old, Ho was running messages back and forth to members of the anti-French underground. The house was a beehive of political talk, always around the theme of Vietnamese independence. A frequent visitor, and occasional fugitive, was Phan Boi Chau, the most prominent of Vietnam’s early nationalists. Among other acqaintances of Nguyen Sinh Sac was Phan Chu Trinh, the constitutionalist who wanted to overthrow the mandarin bureaucracy.

The Nguyen Sinh Sac family was also a “brown canvas” household. The traditional dress of the Vietnamese was the
ao dai
, the
non
, and the
quoc
. For women, the
ao dai
was a long dress worn over black or white trousers that fit loosely around the legs. A rectangular piece of material formed a panel reaching down from the waist in the front and the back. For men the dress was only knee length. The embroidery on the cloth indicated the station in life of the wearer. Gold brocade was reserved for the imperial family. High-ranking mandarins used purple embroidery, and low-ranking mandarins used blue. Peasants could have only the plainest cloth. The
non
was the ubiquitous conical hat made of latania leaves, and the
quoc
were the wooden shoes. Radicals adopted brown canvas clothes as a symbolic protest against mandarin authority and a gesture to blur class lines. By the late 1880s large numbers of men in Nghe An wore brown canvas, in spite of mandarin edicts to the contrary. For much of his life Ho Chi Minh wore brown canvas clothes except at the most formal occasions.

Long before Ho Chi Minh ever heard of Karl Marx and communism, he viewed society through the lens of class conflict, a philosophical inheritance from an egalitarian family. Years later,
The Communist
Manifesto
resonated with Ho Chi Minh, fitting nicely into an intellectual schema decades in the making. When the time came for Ho Chi Minh to become a communist, he played the role enthusiastically.

Phan Boi Chau, a nationalist whose ideas formed much of the discussion in the household, had been born in Nghe An in 1867. His father, though passing the mandarin examinations, refused to work for the government, becoming a teacher in a small village. Phan Boi Chau joined the Scholars’ Revolt in 1885, a resistance movement of Vietnam’s emperor Ham Nghi and a number of mandarin officials against French rule. In 1893 he participated in Phan Dinh Phung’s unsuccessful Nghe Tinh uprising against the French.

By the early 1900s Phan Boi Chau was convinced that Vietnam could enter the modern world only if the French were expelled from Indochina. For a teenaged Ho Chi Minh, Phan Boi Chau must have been an imposing figure. Phan Boi Chau’s round face and wire-rimmed spectacles gave him a scholarly, almost mandarin look, as did the full goatee. But he was no simple scholar. He was a man of intense passion and commitment. “The French,” he said, “treat our people like garbage.... The meek are made into slaves, the strong-minded are thrown into jail. The physically powerful are forced into the army, while the old and weak are left to die.... The land is splashed with blood.” There was also an ascetic look to Phan Boi Chau, as if he had transcended mundane pursuits for a grander cause. If Vietnam was to flower, France must fall.

In 1907, a few years after visiting with the family of Nguyen Sinh Sac, Phan Boi Chau led the abortive Poison Plot, in which low-ranking Vietnamese soldiers tried to poison French officers in Hanoi. The conspiracy was uncovered before it took too large a toll, but Phan Boi Chau became known as the first violent revolutionary in modern Vietnam. He spent years moving about in Japan, China, and Siam, with French police always on his trail. The Chinese arrested him in Shanghai in 1913. He was released from prison in 1917 and spent the rest of his life in China. He died there in 1940.

As a nationalist, Phan Boi Chau was rivaled only by Phan Chu Trinh, another Nghe Annese. Born to a well-to-do family in 1872, Phan Chu Trinh passed the mandarin examinations. A meeting in 1903 with Phan Boi Chau changed his life. Phan Chu Trinh resigned his government post two years later, convinced that the Vietnamese emperor and his mandarin “lackeys” would doom Vietnam to oblivion. But he parted company with Phan Boi Chau on two accounts; Phan Chu Trinh did not believe in radical violence, and he was convinced that the imperial court and mandarin bureaucracy, not the French empire, should be destroyed first. He wanted to work with the French in replacing the mandarins with a modern, democratic political and educational system.

Although neither Phan Boi Chau nor Phan Chu Trinh was able to implement his ideas in the early 1900s, they left a rich legacy. From Phan Boi Chau came the conviction that only revolutionary violence would dislodge the French, and from Phan Chu Trinh came the certainty that the mandarin system was rotten, corrupted by its elitism and its hostility to the modern world and its technology. Ho Chi Minh would eventually have to decide which to destroy first—the French empire or the mandarin court—but by the time he was a young man he already knew his destiny. Nghe An had produced yet another radical.

Ho Chi Minh left Nghe An Province at the end of 1910. He spent nearly a year in Phan Thiet teaching at a school financed by
a nuoc
mam
factory. Late in 1911 he headed south to Saigon, where he enrolled in a vocational school, but he was unhappy learning a trade that the French would use only to exploit him. He left school early in 1912, signed up as a mess boy on a French ocean liner, and left Saigon for the other side of the world. Traveling under the alias of “Van Ba,” Ho Chi Minh got a glimpse of much of the world in the next several years. In North Africa he saw what France was doing to the Algerians; in South Africa he noted what the English and the Boers were doing to the blacks; and in other ports of call he observed the imperial rule of the English, French, Dutch, and Portuguese. He worked in New York City, whetting his curiosity about American democracy, and on the eve of World War I, Ho was in London working as a cook at the Carlton Hotel.

Ho Chi Minh moved to Paris in 1918 and quickly immersed himself in anticolonial politics. There were 100,000 Vietnamese in Paris, and Ho found good restaurants in which to eat his favorite dishes. He met the exiled Phan Chu Trinh and listened to him preach against the evils of the Vietnamese imperial court at Hue and the virtues of democracy and industrialization. Ho Chi Minh met frequently with French socialists, pressing them on the question of empire, trying to discern whether they really wanted to change the world. He supported himself by touching up photographs and writing newspaper articles, adopting the name “Nguyen Ai Quoc” (Nguyen the Patriot) or “Nguyen O Phap” (Nguyen Who Hates the French). In the Vietnamese community, Ho became a leading nationalist, and the French secret police kept track of him.

But then overnight, Ho Chi Minh became a genuine hero. At the Paris Peace Conference negotiating the end of World War I, Ho electrified Vietnamese nationalists when he submitted an eight-point set of demands that included Vietnamese representation in the French parliament; freedom of speech, press, and association; release of all political prisoners; and full equality under the law for the Vietnamese in Indochina. If France would not meet those demands, the empire was morally bankrupt and would surely be destroyed. Looking back on that moment in 1919, the Vietnamese student Bui Lam would remember: “It was like a flash of lightning.... Here was a Vietnamese insisting that his people be accorded their rights.... No two Vietnamese residing in France could meet, after this, without mentioning the name of Nguyen Ai Quoc.”

Ho Chi Minh was soon the soul of the expatriate Vietnamese community. The Vietnamese sought him out, no longer looking to Phan Chu Trinh as their leader. Ho was a charismatic figure. Perhaps it was his combination of revolutionary soul and Confucian personality. His hatred of the French empire knew no bounds, nor did his love for his country. But at the same time Ho Chi Minh was a man of the
luc duc
, the six virtues Confucianism demanded of all leaders:
Tri
(wisdom),
Nhan
(benevolence),
Tin
(sincerity),
Nghia
(righteousness),
Trung
(moderation), and
Hoa
(harmony). He seemed unassuming, a “brown canvas” man from Nghe An.

Paris solidified Ho’s political philosophy. For several years he had been a member of the French Socialist party, but he grew weary of its unwillingness to do anything more than sympathize on the “colonial question.” Ho Chi Minh decided the socialists were “capitalist souls in syndicalist bodies,” too given to parliamentary debate, political compromise, and intellectual moderation to help the Vietnamese. His decision in 1920 to part company with the socialists left him with the problem of finding the real key to Vietnamese liberation. Along with a large faction of French socialists, he decided in 1920 to convert the organization into a French Communist party. His conversion came when a French communist gave him a copy of Vladimir Lenin’s “Thesis on the National and Colonial Questions.” Lenin argued that imperialism was the natural consequence of capitalism. Industrial monopolies, to secure new sources of raw materials and new markets, expand into the underdeveloped world and exploit colonial peoples. The imperial powers enrich themselves by pushing the colonies into poverty. But alongside Western imperialists, Lenin named another enemy: Asian feudalists. A tiny minority of Asian natives, protected by European technology, controlled enormous economic assets, intensifying the suffering of peasants and workers. Revolution was the answer. Throw off the imperial yoke and redistribute property to the peasant masses.

Ho’s introduction to Leninism was electrifying. “What emotion, enthusiasm, clear-sightedness and confidence it instilled in me! I was overjoyed. Though sitting alone in my room I shouted aloud as if addressing large crowds: ‘Dear martyrs, compatriots! This is what we need, this is our path to liberation.’” Here was the solution to the long debate between Phan Boi Chau and Phan Chu Trinh. In the name of Phan Boi Chau, the people of Vietnam must destroy the French colonial apparatus, and in the name of Phan Chu Trinh they must promote revolution in Vietnam, wiping out the last vestiges of mandarin elitism and stripping wealthy, Francophile Vietnamese of their huge estates.

After years of searching, Ho Chi Minh had an ideology to match his passion. In later years, people would debate which was his true love, nationalism or communism? In the United States, anticommunists would see only his communism, arguing that nationalism was just a subterfuge. Antiwar critics, on the other hand, claimed that deep down Ho was a nationalist, that communism was simply the most effective tool for bringing about independence. Ho hated the French empire for what it had done to his country, but he also hated the French-speaking Vietnamese Catholics who enriched themselves at the expense of poor peasants. Ho Chi Minh was a devout communist because in communism he saw the resolution of both evils. Communism fit the hand of Nghe Annese radicalism like a glove.